Adobe Photoshop Compositing: Essential Techniques

Lesson 17 of 33

Soccer Shoot: Jump Shot Part 1

Adobe Photoshop Compositing: Essential Techniques

Lesson 17 of 33

Soccer Shoot: Jump Shot Part 1

Lesson Info

Soccer Shoot: Jump Shot Part 1

if you wouldn't mind standing right in the center of the crash but about where you're going to be okay looks right and I'm just going to make sure I'm going to pop this in the auto focus I'm going to focus and and we're good to go okay ready whenever you are james yep back in manual focus yeah yeah sure if you want teo yeah that was awesome you scared me I hate it too late yeah all right let's go again huh that was amazing I'm digging this yeah it does make a difference what's that oh it does yeah all right let's uh yeah keep going you're doing great yeah I'm okay with that as long as we're long as we're staying in focus I'm definitely okay with that oh that's cool all right I'm I'll keep taking pictures that day that you want to keep jumping all right we're coming out really awesome um do we wantto change let's see this time maybe instead of like so sideways maybe we could do like a you know trying to catch you in the air and actually if we want to bring the ball in or yeah yeah let's...

do it all right try not teo kick it through the tv first one without it so I know about where he's going to be yeah how dangerous is this what we actually did this I'm game if you guys are um you're good you're good oh that actually that actually works it does look like you're trying to kick the ball so yeah could you go a little higher yeah yeah all right yep ah that was like a ninja kick all right awesome with these let's go ahead and let's raise the beauty dish with these higher kicks let's go ahead and make sure we raise the beauty dish a little bit to make sure that that's not in the shot and also so it's going to still do what we need to uh a little bit more all right yep that looks great perfect all right james country stand here in the center I'm gonna just refocus okay good to go what's that okay awesome okay let's take a quick break let's go ahead and load those into photo shop and uh see what we've got going on all right good job guys normally we would clap during this way we're doing this without any music like and that was anti climactic all right so going through these that's that's awesome so I want a flying a couple of these pics earlier when we were talking about compression uh you remember we were talking about using like a wide angle lens versus something a little bit more long andi can kind of see this now we've changed the angle from aside on shot to something that's a little bit more like he's coming towards the camera and you can see like how large his legs look you know compared to the rest of his body especially versus what we started with now with an action shot that's not always a bad thing like you wouldn't want to do you wouldn't want to do a portrait like this or you know something like a usually fashion you don't want to do left and right like this because it'll stretch people's faces out if you're shooting fashion you can usually shoot from like the from down low up higher and that's going to make people look a little bit taller so you can use these sort of things in your advantage in different ways so sports again I really don't mind stuff like this but just keep in mind that it it will totally change the feel of an image that's awesome it's like yeah that's really cool too um that's awesome okay so those air are so you can see also like when the crash pad was coming from this other angle in my opinion this doesn't look as dramatic or as cool as this like doesn't that look cool like it's coming out towards the camera in this way it's kind of like it shrinks that motion it makes it look a lot less dramatic so moving the crash pad in I think it was a really good really good move this is just cool we'll give you animated gif of this later if you want that's awesome shot so right now I'm just going through hitting left and right and hitting p on the on the images that I like okay I'm gonna hit g to bring up my to bring up my grid mode and then I'm going to go ahead and filter these bye picks so we're just going to click on this filter and then I'm gonna shift click all these layers I'm gonna hit our no I'm gonna hit in yeah there we go all right and end brings up um I don't know what this motors called some of my mode yes thank you are his crop and up there's going to be five up if you have five picked six up so that's where the end shortcut key comes from going in up oh that's going in all right cool now it's basically like choosing which is our favorite one from these again I'm gonna let you guys here in our audience kind of vote on which which one you like bottom right okay so usually I'll say like you know when I'm going through these I'll usually do like an immediate know so if you hold on controller command and click on one of these it'll eliminate it out you know we'll say like ok I don't want to do that one and then I can look att you know just these two I like this modi like how everything moves around when you click on it so we'll go with the last one so this will be the image that we want a composite again so let's just right click here going to go to show in finder and again we're just gonna do the same thing so um there we go we're gonna hit open image so for those you guys at home and here in the studio you know like the whole idea behind compositing I hope that you guys have learned by now it's like so much of it is done in pre production and so much of it is done in camera so by the time you get into photo shop you're not trying to do something crazy you're just making it work you're putting it in there you're getting all your lighting done ahead of time so when you get in photoshopped maybe you're doing a little color correction some exposure correction things like that and then you can focus on making your image amazing yeah just is there any reason you wouldn't make a marquee selection of the image and then pull it over so it eliminates taking oh yeah you can totally do that to that's a great suggestion so grabbing the marquis selection and then just you know like so we don't have to include all the other stuff around the image yeah totally so we can just make a selection right there and this we're going to be photographing the bowl separately but if I wanted to just like keep in mind about where that ball placement was because obviously this is I think it actually helped didn't help having the bowl in there it seemed like it did because it was like it gave you a little bit of a target something that aim for so if I was you know when we photographed the ball separately I'm going to basically try to put it in about the same place that it actually was because that that would make a lot more sense because he'll be looking at the ball too and we did add some questions about line of sight and we talked about using a prop to have something to look at and in this case I think the ball does a great job of that so yeah I'm making this election I'm just using the move tool and I'm gonna hold down the shift key and I'm gonna click and drag from one image to another one and by holding the shifty what that does is it makes sure that it stays in the center so it doesn't like you know it won't put it in and it's like right there all right there we go and now what we're gonna do we're gonna turn this layer off again and we're basically going to go through the same set here so we'll go up to select and down here to color range all right and this time there's a little bit of a wrinkle there so we'll hit this plus I drop her there click over there and you're going to see we had some questions about his shirt earlier like is this gonna wind up selecting his shirt we're seeing here because there was some wrinkle in the backdrop which basically produces a darker green and I selected that color range out now we're actually going to see that yet because we had to select out the darker green it is going to wind up selecting out of shared a little bit so I'm gonna try to lower my fuzziness just a bit and see if that's going to solve the problem and uh and it looked like that did so just really quick tips on selecting things out so let's sit okay there we go we're going to click on our layer mask here hit command I layer mask I'm gonna click on my later mask now and we're going to go to select and then down to refine mask because I already know that I'm going to be adding a little bit of feathering and I'm going to be contracting my edge so was that a little bit of feathering and we're going to shift the edge in just a bit too much feathering in his journal look totally fake by the way all right cool and usually if I'm doing all this stuff on set I'll have my subject you know my model or whatever like go interact with other people on the set or whatever it is or we'll say like okay maybe spend you know five minutes fixing up your makeup or something like that and then I'll bring them back for for the rough composite and like basically do reveal and that's like it's just a little bit of a way to add some excitement like oh man that was amazing but uh yeah I want to do any more of this so usually I don't show my subject that's part of it not that so you like secret or something like that I just they tend to get more excited about it okay so we went ahead and cut out like you guys and say that was incredibly quick like to get our subject completely cut out from the background and we have the greens hearing in there so I'm gonna grab let's just turn on this black and white when it hit command tea and now we can kind of decide like you know where where do we actually want you know it's photoshopped right weaken could do anything we want we really can who wanted to make it look like a bicycle kick um just keep in mind you don't want to go too far because the rim lights starts and not match right so like here the rim lights they everything makes sense you know if we went here it would probably still make sense but we don't want to go too far with this I think james you doing awesome and this is this is really great so what the scream yeah I think it did actually all right so I'm just gonna darken that down a little bit and uh bring us in all right cool so with this life just things that I'm thinking about when I'm compositing this sort of thing a little bit of like what's called like peking or whatever when when a light that's behind someone's face um if you kenbrell it over in front of someone's face kind of what's going on here with the city I'm here if you can bring this over top in front of someone's face it can really create like a really cool effect a lot of time so obviously I did like a very crude job of that just then but like let's just bring the capacity upon that there we go like a little bit of these peking effects I really like adding those into my composites because they help it make because the light peaking and lend slurs and stuff that happens at the camera level right so if you have something that's happening at the camera level it wrote it really does is it pushes your subject into the photo because it says like okay if if I have a little bit of flair in front of my subject then the subject must be behind the camera right the subject must be in the frame because I'm getting flare right here so doing just a little little like tricks and things like that that really helps to push your subject back into the image and we did something like that with our image yesterday if you guys remember so just little things like that and that helps when your subject is actually like covering up a light or something like that so just keep that in mind if your subject prison you know if you know that place right there you you can't do that effect that obviously does not work rate so just kind of keep that in mind like where you place your subject is totally going to depend on if you can if you can use those effects so I've got just like a small little tool bag of those like the you know the peking and things like that and then you know the same like what we talked about earlier with this kind of knock back the background back in space as well so any time you can use those little bit of lighting effects they're going to really help sell the effect all right I think this is looking great already what you guys think can we get some feedback from the in studio audience we're all yes good can't ever tell e way good yeah we're all just like that just happened in front of us wow yeah it really does it's amazing I mean that's just like it's a wonderful thing about you know compositing is like you you plan on these things you know like you you have these ideas for what these images they're gonna look like but you never really know right you never really know until until it's happening right in front of your face and then it does news like wow that totally worked so you guys since we were actually going to be doing some really cool things so one of the reasons I wanted to reserve you know all of tomorrow for our photo shop was because I want to go through some really cool things we're going to be doing with dodging and burning too because like compositing is one thing and we're going toe rock this composite we're gonna make it amazing but we're also going to show I'm going to show you howto like this really cool dodging burnings there's this sports portrait we wanted to have like gritty grimy feel to it like super high contrast so I'm doing like a very rough version of dodging and burning right now I'm just kind of like darkening these areas down in photo shop and what the reason I'm doing that is because this this area is dark and like we said earlier like a dark is going to it's going to act like a subtracted light light will work is like an additive light so I'm going to dark in these areas down and you can see how just that little effect it makes it look a lot more really right and even things like there's there's a tiny bit of you can see there's a tiny bit of glow right here which that actually would not be there in the final image but I'm going to just show you like a really quick trick that we can do here in photoshopped that I'll do a much better version of uh later I'm just going paint with this darker color there and immediately check out much more realistic that composite looks because we're just getting rid of that little bit of globe so if you do this overtop of your entire image if you do this everywhere around your image where you know you're lighting effects you know like here on the socks for instance that needs to be a little bit darker right so if you do this everywhere around your entire image where you have just a little areas that like okay well that needs either be lighter or darker doing those and taking a bunch of little steps is going to help make your composite feel like its level really and yeah it just kind of like looking at this image is a whole remember guys we're still able to change everything so if I was like oh man I like him in that place but he's not in front of the right stadium light like remember all of our lights are movable right like weaken still totally move these up or down or left right so where it doesn't matter if it's not perfect right now because when we go on day three we can move everything we want I could have five more lights if I wanted it really you know the possibilities they're totally endless if I want to take this out and I wanted to crop the image in and move my lights I could I could do that too on so you know keep keep these things in mind while you're creating your composite let's just hit that check t I have this unchecked which is the crop delete pixels so if I want to get that information back at any point in time I have that option now I can get that information back at any point in time so let's just click this and then we're going to take a take a look at this and just kind of decided the whole like do we like this that's that's the big question we're compositing it's like okay huge part of composite is like okay let's make this work right but then the other question and oftentimes more more important question is do we like it like is it what we were going for is it cool and it's of my opinion that yes I knew like that what do we think the studio audience awesome awesome

Class Description

Compositing allows you to bring the vivid images of your dreams to life. Join Phlearn’s Aaron Nace for an exploration of the artistic and technical skills that are essential to creating stunning composite images.

You’ll see Aaron’s core techniques in action, from start to finish – beginning with a green screen photography shoot and ending with an elaborate post-production compositing session. Aaron will shoot a sports-themed action shot and a model in a flowing dress. Then he’ll teach you how to build a background out of multiple images with a focus on making the new background dynamic and believable. You’ll also learn lighting techniques for matching your photo shoot light to the light in the alternate backgrounds. Finally, you’ll explore the best ways to use Adobe® Photoshop® to assemble your images so they match your unique, creative vision.

This course will teach you everything you need to know to conceptualize and produce complex, visual masterpieces driven by your imagination. What will you create?

Kim

This was the Best Creative Live course I have had the pleasure to watch. Aaron was so informative and explained each technique very well. He was so pleasant to watch because he was so humble and was so happy and excited about what he was creating. What an excellent teacher. I hope he does more seminars.

Curtis

Fantastic Course! I've watched (and purchased) many courses from Creative Live, and there are many good instructors; excellent instructors, in fact. Aaron's course on compositing essentials is one of the best. In addition to being a technical expert, he is a great teacher; a real talent. Great information and good illustrations/explanations. He does go a little fast when using Photoshop, and while I was trying to find the short-cuts keys, I would find he was three more points down the trail ahead of me. (That's part of why I bought the course ;-) )

AJ Photography Ireland

I purchased Photoshop Compositing Essentials after watching the course on live, from start to finish here in Ireland. I was so impressed with the teaching style of Aaron in this course ( I have also purchased an earlier course by Aaron), that I just had to purchase this course too. I have always had an interest in Compositing - having tried and had reasonable success.. however Aarons way in which he passes on his knowledge and expertese in this subject is pure Mastery to watch and absorb. This is indeed a complex skill and there is so much to learn.. but,Aaron's manner in which he teaches comes across as almost &quot; one to one&quot; in nature and so enjoyable and absorbing to learn from. Having purchased the course and once again on a personal One to one' teacher pupil experience I cannot recomment Aarons courses enough . Learning through Creative live is such a joy.. ( Im 57 and been into photography since my teens and working as a Professional photographer here in Ireland for the last ten years -- As an ex Cop in London for thirty years and now supposed to be retired ( ! ), I can now experience my Love of photography in a working enviroment and continue to learn my Craft with Creative live. Thanks C.L !!! Andy Jay - Cork Ireland. www.ajphotography.ie and WWW.andyjayphoto.COM